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Untranslatability and Philosophy View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Repository@Nottingham INVISIBLE UNTRANSLATABILITY AND PHILOSOPHY KATHRYN BATCHELOR The subtitle of the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, ‘dictionnaire des intraduisibles’, links the publication to the issue of untranslatability that has accompanied discussions of translation throughout history; Andrew Chesterman even goes so far as to identify untranslatability as one of the five ‘supermemes’ of translation.1 This problematization of the very possibility of translation, and the issues that it pushes to the fore, becomes particularly acute when considered in conjunction with another issue on which scholarly attention has recently focussed, namely that of translation invisibility. This latter notion – associated primarily with the writings of Lawrence Venuti – refers to the general tendency to overlook the fact of a text’s translation; to read a text as if it were the original, and to ignore the inevitable differences that are introduced through the act of translation. In this paper, I shall outline recent thinking on the issue of untranslatability as it relates specifically to philosophy, examining the implications of the translation of untranslatables, particularly in terms of how the relationship between originals and translations is conceived. I shall also assess the extent to which invisibility is truly an issue in relation to translations of philosophical texts, and explore the inevitable dissonance that arises if a transparent relationship between philosophical translations and their originals is assumed. Translation scholars have tended to align themselves into two camps with regard to their thinking on translatability. Some, such as Ortega y Gasset, writing in 1937, argue that translation is in itself impossible, by definition a ‘utopian task’.2 Similar lines of argument continue to be put forward by translation scholars today: Paul Ricoeur, for example, devotes a third of his recent volume, Sur la traduction to the notion of untranslatability, taking the view that translation is characterized both by ‘un intraduisible de départ’,3 linked to the inherent heterogeneity of languages, and by an ‘intraduisible terminal’,4 the unavoidable betrayal operated by translation, and which means that translation should be viewed as an act of ‘construction du comparable’ rather than as restitution of meaning.5 The second camp limits the notion of untranslatability to certain types of translation, or rather to the translation of certain types of text, most notably literary and particularly poetic ones. Roman Jakobson, for example, states that ‘poetry by definition is untranslatable’,6 a view that is famously echoed in the cliché generally attributed to Robert Frost, ‘poetry is what gets lost in translation’. What critics such as Jakobson are pointing to when they argue the untranslatability of poetry are not specific words or expressions that poets are likely to use, but rather to the way in which poets use language, exploiting as they do the intrinsic sound properties of words, and creating meaning by many indirect routes rather than by relying on the established conventional connections between words and their semantic contents. As Juliane House summarizes, ‘in a poetic-aesthetic [elsewhere ‘form-oriented’] work of art, the usual distinction between form and content (or meaning) no longer holds. [...] Since the physical nature of signifiers in one language can never be duplicated in another language, the relations of signifiers to signified, which are no longer arbitrary in a poetic-aesthetic work, cannot be expressed in another language’.7 Although not all philosophical texts can be viewed as heavily form-focused, the relevance of this type of untranslatability to the work of a number of philosophers is clear, and has been discussed in some depth by the translators of those works. Alan Bass, for example, highlights some of the translatorial challenges that he faced when translating Derrida’s L’Ecriture et la différence: The question arises – and it is a serious one – whether these essays can be read in a language other than French [...] Derrida always writes with close attention to the resonances and punning humor of etymology. Occasionally, when the Greek and Latin inheritances of English coincide, this aspect of Derrida’s style can be captured; more often it requires [...] laborious annotation [...] The translator, constantly aware of what he is sacrificing, is often tempted to use a language that is a compromise between English as we know it and English as he would like it to be in order to capture as much of the original text as possible.8 Gayatri Spivak, translator of Derrida’s De la grammatologie, also describes the challenges posed by the linguistic complexities of Derrida’s writing: Denying the uniqueness of words, their substantiality, their transferability, their repeatability, Of Grammatology denies the possibility of translation. Not so paradoxically perhaps, each twist of phrase becomes at the same time ‘significant’ and playful when language is manipulated for the purpose of putting signification into question, for deconstructing the binary opposition ‘signifier-signified’. That playfulness I fear I have not been able remotely to capture.9 As these translators observe, it is not only specific terms and expressions used by Derrida that are untranslatable, but rather his method of writing as a whole, the intricate relationship between the exploration of the French language and the development of philosophical thought which renders his texts – like other ‘poetic- aesthetic’ texts – untranslatable. Similar translation difficulties apply to a number of German philosophers, most notably Hegel and Heidegger. As Michael Inwood argues, the complexity of Hegel’s use of language makes his work very difficult to study in translation: The intricacies of Hegel’s German are difficult for a German-speaker to unravel. But the difficulties are multiplied for the English-speaker. A significant German word often has a range of meaning and use to which no single English word exactly corresponds [...] Even if a German word has an acceptable English equivalent, its history and (real or supposed etymology) are likely to differ from those of the English word: no translation can subject ‘judge’ and ‘judgement’ to the manoeuvres that urteilen and Urteil undergo in Hegel’s hands.10 The significance of this type of translation difficulty to Hegel’s work goes beyond the links between a word and its etymology, extending to the very act of philosophizing itself. One of the themes that emerges most strongly through Hegel’s work is that it is the means, not the end, that is his philosophy, or, as David Lamb puts it: Merely to ask for his [the philosopher’s] conclusions, as one would ask an economist, physician, engineer, and so on, is to miss the whole point of philosophy. The objective, or goal, is expressed in the road upon which one travels towards the destination, but there is no ultimate destination for the road is circular; it is infinite.11 The words which Hegel uses thus become part of the very process that is philosophy; according to this view of philosophy, the philosopher should, as Inwood summarizes, ‘watch words developing their own senses rather than arbitrarily declare that he intends to use them in such and such a way’.12 This aspect of untranslatability in philosophy, which relates to the very process and manner of writing and has much in common with the untranslatability of poetic or form-focused texts, differs from the untranslatability of poetry in one important respect. Whereas the translation problems relating to poetry are usually confined to the translation of a particular poem, or set of poems, form-focused untranslatability in philosophy results in complex, multi-layered terms that often come to form important elements in the philosopher’s argument, and are subsequently taken up and discussed by other philosophers. It is these terms that – in considerable part, at least – are the concern of the Vocabulaire, and for which Cassin coins the term ‘un intraduisible’: Nous sommes quelques-uns, philosophes / philologues / traducteurs [...] à travailler ensemble pour confectionner ce que nous appelons entre nous un Dictionnaire des intraduisibles. [...] ces intraduisibles ont été, sont et seront constamment traduits : « intraduisible » est là seulement pour dire le degré de difficulté qu’on endure à rendre certains mots et réseaux (des météores : kairos, concetto, desengano, des traînées d’histoire : Gelassenheit ... ; des poids lourds : conscience/conscience, consciousness Bewußtsein, Gewissen [...])13 Like the Vocabulaire, translations of philosophical texts tend to focus on the untranslatability of the specific words or expressions that arise out of the original writing process, rather than on the untranslatability of the mode of writing itself. Alan Bass’s introduction to his translation of Derrida’s L’Ecriture et la différance, for example, stresses the need for the translation to be accompanied, ideally, by a detailed commentary explaining some of the multiple meanings of specific terms used by Derrida, highlighting the ‘close attention [paid by Derrida] to the resonances and punning humour of etymology’.14 In this introduction, Bass provides a translation of a note from L’Ecriture et la différance, inserting Derrida’s original French terms in brackets after the English translation, and highlighting relevant intertextual and
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